Expat wanderer

About a year ago, I finally bought an iPhone. It could do so many things, it scared me, but when my little (then) 18 month old grandson fearlessly showed me how to play Tozzle, and Zombies in the Garden, and Angry Birds, I knew it was time for me to step up my game.

I don’t want my identity stolen, I don’t want Google tracking my searches, I don’t want targeted advertising, so I’ve been really careful about what I do. And then I though about the CIA. The CIA and NSA (aka No Such Agency) and several other highly technical services find themselves inundated with so much information these days that they have a harder time sorting it and then determining what is important and what is not. That gives me hope. I’m just not that important. Who would want to track me?

So, after a year, I finally synched my iPhone with my computer for the first time. Very scary. Then, when it didn’t work, I don’t know why, I restored the original settings, losing what little I had stored on the phone, but it wasn’t much.

Mostly, I like ringtones. I like for the people who call me regularly to have identifiable ring tones, and I have been really happy with the ones I have except for my daughter-in-law, I wanted an Edith Piaf song for her, and I never could find it.

Today, I girded my loins and bought a ring tone from a non-iTunes provider. Yes. Scary. And I thought it would magically go straight to my phone, but no, I had to download it, save it into iTunes, then synch my phone.

Earlier, I had taken another giant step and subscribed to “the Cloud” so, I thought, my computer, iPad and iPhone would all have the same music, but as it turns out, not everything goes to the cloud, like ringtones that you don’t buy from iTunes. So I had to risk everything and Synch again. It warned me that I could lose everything! I hesitated, then asked “what would I do if I were 11?” and pressed Synch. Woooo HOOOO, oh, the exhilaration!

There are some things I don’t want my devices to share, like financial information, etc. I don’t really want something like my iPhone, which gets carried everywhere and has the highest probability to get lost or stolen (although I have activated the Find My iPhone program, too). It’s a good think it’s not all-or-nothing, but it takes a longer time when you want some things but not others.

Now, I am all synched-up, and oh, I feel so dramatically technological, as I jump into last years technology. I know that my problem is over-thinking; the secret is to just jump in, just do it. I am just so thankful I have a son and a grandson to help me make the technology leaps.